Sins

When a man (always a man) becomes a priest in the Roman Catholic Church, he takes vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. All three—and their opposites, and their corruptions—have been sometimes ironic themes of the internal crisis that currently afflicts the American branch of the Church and seems to be the leading edge of a crisis within the entire worldwide institution. The priestly vows correspond, roughly, to the id, the ego, and the superego, into which a less venerable orthodoxy divided the human psyche; and these three, too, have been playing their roles, in mostly unbalanced and distorting ways. The precipitating factor is a cascading series of disclosures detailing the sexual exploitation of children and, more commonly, adolescent boys by a large number (though a small minority) of priests, in many dioceses throughout the country. The wave began in January, in Boston, where a dogged investigation by the Globe established that a priest named John J. Geoghan had been shuttled from parish to unsuspecting parish for thirty years, even though his superiors, including Bernard Cardinal Law, the Archbishop of Boston, knew with increasing certainty that he was a serial and, finally, incorrigible sexual molester. It quickly emerged that some eighty priests had been similarly (and credibly) accused, and similarly protected, in Boston alone. There have been secondary explosions from coast to coast; in all, some two thousand priests have been accused. And, while the United States is the epicenter, scandals of the same type have erupted abroad; in Ireland, in January, the Church agreed to pay a hundred and ten million dollars to compensate some three thousand victims of child abuse. One might say that Boston was merely the tip of the iceberg, except that what is happening feels more like last week’s sudden, unsettling melting of a country-sized part of the Antarctic ice shelf.

The big shocker, for Catholics and non-Catholics alike, has been not so much the abuse itself—awful and heartbreaking though it is—as the coldly bureaucratic “handling” of it by hierarchs like Law and the current Archbishop of New York, Edward Cardinal Egan, who faced yet another such scandal for several years when he was Bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut. The anger of Catholic commentators has been astonishing. One of many who have weighed in wrote, “The resignation-in-disgrace of Cardinal Law would be meaningful only in the context of an equivalent resignation by Pope John Paul II, of whose antireform policies—closed, secretive, dishonest, totalitarian—Cardinal Law is a mere functionary.” And another: “The crisis in the Catholic Church lies not with the fraction of priests who molest youngsters but in an ecclesiastical power structure that harbors pedophiles, conceals other sexual behavior patterns among its clerics, and uses strategies of duplicity and counterattack against the victims.” That first snippet is from a recent article by James Carroll, a distinguished author and a former priest. The second is from “Lead Us Not Into Temptation” (1992), by Jason Berry, a journalist who, in 1985, in articles for the Times of Acadiana, a small Cajun-country weekly, broke the first of several seemingly isolated stories of abusive priests that foreshadowed the present mess. After another such case, in Massachusetts in 1993, Cardinal Law went after the press. “By all means,” he thundered, “we call down God’s power on the media, particularly the Globe.” This time, though, there has been little or no attempt to attribute the revelations to anti-Catholic sensationalism. Through the efforts of newspapers like the Globe and the Hartford Courant, reams of formerly confidential documents, including transcripts of depositions given by Church officials, have been made public. They speak for themselves, and what they say appalls.

The Pilot, the official newspaper of the Boston Archdiocese (Bernard Law, publisher), noted in an editorial two weeks ago that “these scandals have raised serious questions in the minds of the laity that simply will not disappear,” including the question of whether celibacy should “continue to be a normative condition for the diocesan priesthood.” (The editorial ended with a promise that the following week’s installment would concern “questions that circulate around the issue of ordaining women,” but, when the next issue came out, readers found instead a lengthy denial that the previous editorial had been intended “to call for changes in Church policies.”) Yet it is only common sense to see a connection between the scandals and the requirement of priestly celibacy—and, for that matter, between the scandals and the exclusion of women not only from the priesthood but from all positions of official power within the Church.

One needn’t be a Catholic to have some inkling of the spiritual impulse behind celibacy, which, like poverty, is presumably meant to signify a priest’s radical dependence on the divine. But it must be said that the vows are unevenly stressed: though the priesthood pays badly, priests who earn or inherit extra money can do what they like with it. (One of the accused had his own summer cottage, to which he took the boys he exploited.) Divorced from its spiritual purpose and turned into a job requirement, celibacy becomes either a sham or a suppression of one’s humanity, or both. Like the Church’s rejection of contraception, and its insistence (sometimes nominal, sometimes not) on the sinfulness of any form of sexual expression that is not both marital and procreative, mandatory priestly celibacy is increasingly driving a wedge between the hierarchy and the laity, with priests themselves caught in the middle. And even among Catholics who embrace those teachings, there is widespread disgust with the authoritarian high-handedness of the hierarchy.

Within the Church, celibacy is a matter not of religious dogma but of ecclesiastical law. It can be changed. The Church is not a democracy, and a humane resolution will presumably await the advent of a Pope who seeks one. No one expects, or wants, the vestries of Catholic churches to be populated by swingers. But the day will surely come when a Catholic priesthood that includes men and women, married and single, in which ascetic celibacy and human intimacy are parallel spiritual paths, will appear in retrospect to have been as inevitable as majority rule in South Africa and the withering away of Soviet Communism seem now. ♦

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.